Moodle on OpenShift

Moodle on OpenShift

by José Grimaldo -
Number of replies: 4

I have downloaded a recent (less than a month ago) Moodle (with Moodle essentials Theme) and installed it on OpenShift.

I have very modest needs, where at most I would like to support five concurrent users. However, page page load times vary from 1.5 seconds to 11 seconds (even when loading the same page!) for just one concurrent user. I have some Joomla sites on OpenShift that run without issue for many months so I did not know how to proceed.


My question is: Is Moodle just resource intensive that such non-dedicated environments can't be used or it may have something to do with Moodle Essentials? Any of you had success running Moodle on OpenShift (Small Gear)?

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In reply to José Grimaldo

Re: Moodle on OpenShift

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

This is yet another "cloud" hosting arrangement I take it?

Well, does it meet the requirements for running Moodle? Ultimately it's still black, metal boxes in a rack somewhere!

I could find very little solid information amongst the marketing on their web site. 

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle on OpenShift

by José Grimaldo -

Yeah, it's similar to Google App Engine, however it's easier to use. I'm not sure if it meets the Moodle requirements, I don't think they make any clear guarantees regarding processing performance. The only information I could find was this:

 

 RAMDiskCost / hour
Small 512 MB RAM 1 GB disk Free

 

Is there a way to know where the overheard is? IO or CPU? Any plugin that I can install to measure it?

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In reply to José Grimaldo

Re: Moodle on OpenShift

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

You're going to have a hard time running Moodle in 512MB of RAM. Although I suppose it's hard to know exactly what that means. 

The other thing that might be killing you is the (virtual) disk subsystem performance. Moodle is quite sensitive to that as a lot of stuff is cached to disk (unless you set up the MUC in some other way). 

If you go to Site administration > Development > Debugging there's an option to switch on 'Performance info' which is shown in the page footer. This can give you an idea. You can also run the cache performance tests, although you'll really need a system that 'works' to compare it against. 

Ultimately, if it's free then I'm not sure how much you can expect. Moodle is a big lump of software wink

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle on OpenShift

by José Grimaldo -

Thank you very much for the swift response. I believe this pinpoints my problem.

Because of the small number of concurrent users RAM memory in use was at about 100 MB, but disk performance is lacking. I'll have to consider other options for hosting, unfortunately.

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